"What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters." Edgar Degas (1834-1917)

Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning February 23, will
feature a series of early portraits by the two artists and highlight the
Dutch master’s guiding influence on the young French Impressionist. The
first exhibition to examine this subject, it will unite some two dozen
works by the artists, including oil portraits, drawings, and etchings
from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection and other museums in the
United States and abroad. The intimate scale of the exhibition and size
of the works on display will illuminate the unique kinship that exists
between the self-portraits created by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) at the start of their illustrious careers.

The exhibition was organized by the Rijksmuseum, in association with The
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute.

The Metropolitan Museum has enjoyed recent collaborations with both institutions, respectively: Miró: The Dutch Interiors with the Rijksmuseum (2010) and Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings: The Clark Brothers Collect with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2007).

In the 19th century, appreciation for Rembrandt’s genius, which had
wavered since his death, gained renewed popularity, particularly in
France. By the 1850s, when Rembrandt enjoyed nearly cult-like status,
Degas was seeking to establish his own artistic identity. Frustrated by
the rigidity of the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, he quit school,
setting off for Italy for three years of independent study to find his
voice as an artist. During this pivotal period, Degas studied prints by
Rembrandt in French and Italian collections, often copying them into his
sketch books, and even developing one of them into an etching. These
exercises gave way to a series of self-portraits in which Degas explored
a range of tonal effects, from subtle shading to dramatic contrasts of
light and dark, inspired by Rembrandt’s graphic invention.

This highly focused exhibition—not unlike the Metropolitan’s recent Cézanne’s Card Players in spring 2011—will afford a unique perspective on the Metropolitan Museum’s Degas Self-Portrait
(ca. 1855-56) in oil and more than a dozen works on paper by the
artists, including multiple states of etchings, which are rarely on
view. It will also present a handful of works by contemporaries of
Degas, such as Henri Fantin-Latour, to document that Degas was not alone
in his admiration for Rembrandt. Anchored by works from the
Metropolitan Museum’s distinguished Degas holdings (which are second
only to the French National Museums) and from the Rijksmuseum, the
exhibition will also feature key loans from the Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute, the Bayerische Staatgëmaldesammlungen in Munich,
The Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the
Morgan Library & Museum.

The exhibition was previously on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown,
Massachusetts.

Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is organized at the Metropolitan Museum by Susan Alyson Stein, Curator, in the Museum’s Department of European Paintings.

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[I am a force of the past.Tradition is my only love.I come from the ruins, and churches,and altarpieces, the abandonedvillages on the Appennines or on the Prealps,where brothers have lived.Like a madman I wander on the Tuscolana,On the Appia like a dog without a master.Or I observe the twilights, and the morningsover Rome, and Ciociaria, and the world,as the first acts of the After-History,which I partake of, by chronological privilege,from the extreme border of someburied age.]- Pier Paolo Pasolini

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

- Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

"Manners Maketh Man."

- William of Wykeham, the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford(1324 - 1404)

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